That's true Mike! Pity there's no space on the front panel for all those cool controls we want, but if you remove the speaker you can drill the grille full of holes and add loads, starting with Treble, Mid, Bass and Stereo Balance, and then drill loads more holes in the top to relocate the speaker.
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Functionally a digital display is a nonsense: the elegant use of a single 1MHz tuning range for the main tuning dial means that it is calibrated in 10kHz increments which can be adjusted at the ends against the 1MHz spurs so the frequency can be read within at worst 2kHz, or roughly 10% of the IF Bandwidth. So, if you want to keep a watch for a transmission such as 6628kHz you can set your FRG so the full channel is within the receiver bandwidth. A nice challenge is the NCDXF International Beacon Project which has sequential transmissions on 14.100, 18.110, 21.150, 24.930, and 28.200 MHz and you can challenge yourself further to see if you can chase one of the stations up the bands, which should just be possible for 20, 17, 15 and 10 metres! As for broadcast stations, there is no problem tuning to the 5kHz channels.
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Aesthetically it seems like sacriledge to me to spoil a classic and simple design. It's like hot-rodding a classic car except you'll never get this one to go any faster: its limitations are all inherent to the technology used at the time. To do a proper job you should remove all the innards from this 70s model and graft in an 80s model with LED readout thereby ruining two different receivers! Better perhaps to get an 80s receiver to use and keep the FRG-7 on display. This will save trashing not only the appearance but also the resale value.
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?- Julian
Julian_Hardstone
MikeM